Ben Kaufman says it looks nice, arrived on time

Enquirer
reporters and editors should be satisfied with their initial tabloid
effort. Today’s inaugural edition — smaller and printed in Columbus — is
a curious hybrid. It arrived on time. It feels and looks like a
tabloid, but it reads like a familiar Enquirer rather than something
exciting and new. That
might not be bad. Others — who haven’t spent 50-plus years in the newspaper
and wire service trade and worked on two tabloids — will decide whether
the tabloid Enquirer works well enough to buy. That’s important because
print ads bring in many times the cash of online ads. Page
1 is a showcase. Catch the readers’ attention to turn them inside to
highly promoted stories. That’s tabloid. Enquirer designers have been
refining this for months on larger pages last printed yesterday. Page
2 is weather and other stuff. My question: Will older readers complain
about the small type? Readers who need glasses probably are the
majority. The
organization of the rest of the paper is familiar and most stories are
short. Good. Few stories today require more than that, especially one
that continues for days and weeks. Regular readers will learn enough.
Readers who are unsatisfied can learn more elsewhere without abandoning
the Enquirer. It would be no crime if longer versions appeared on Cincinnati.com. That could be a productive synergy. If
there is a problem in the news pages, it’s the black/white inside news
photos. Sports suffers most. Too many are too small, too dark. That
could be an inking problem on the new Columbus Dispatch presses. If not,
it would be ironic if the new Enquirer format meant fewer inside color
photos and photographers having to relearn black-and-white photography. And
small news photos. Here’s where the format cramps. A large photo
doesn’t leave much room for type and there is a limit to how many times
readers will go to another page to learn more about the pictured event. The
special promotional section about the paper — with names and images of
the staff — is a keeper in addition to the existing online contact list.
It was good to see old colleagues and friends looking well and to put
faces to new names. My
one complaint is that the shift in headline type. Now, news stories and
ads that imitate news stories now have the same or similar bold black
headlines. That’s bad. Previously, news and ads had starkly different
type faces. That was an honest effort to alert readers to the
difference. I hope the Enquirer will find a new type face for ads since the bold, black headlines work for tabloid news. Having
nursed a new daily to life years ago, I still can recall the pleasure
of holding that first edition. I hope Enquirer journalists know that
feeling today.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

• Here’s
a story for local health/medicine reporters: why is Christ Hospital
reducing service at its outpatient cardiac rehab center? Recently,
patients received this bizarre letter:
“In order to continue the highest level of care for our growing patient volume, we have adjusted our office hours. Effective January 2nd, 2013, (sic)
hours of operation for Phase II cardiac rehabilitation will be Monday,
Wednesday and Friday, 6:00 AM through 4:00 PM. Hours on Tuesday and
Thursday will be 6 AM to 2:30 PM. Thank you for choosing The Christ
Hospital Health Network.”
That
significantly shortens the afternoon/evening hours daily for a “growing
patient volume.” Didn’t anyone read this Orwellian language before it
went out over an exec’s signature on hospital letterhead? To continue
the highest level of care Christ will provide less, especially if
patients need outpatient cardio rehab after work?
If
outpatient rehab has too few clients, are cardiologists and cardiac
surgeons at this aggressively marketed heart hospital urging patients to
work out at the Mount Auburn facility? Aren’t these docs telling us to
quit smoking, lose weight and exercise more?
It’s
not a question of the quality of the care by therapists and RNs at the
outpatient rehab center; if it were, it would be closed.
• The
Sunday Enquirer carried a valuable column on Dec. 30 on what Ohio laws
passed in 2012 mean. Picked up from the Columbus Dispatch, it’s a marvel
of brevity and clarity and it proves there still can be substance
inside the Sunday Enquirer Local section.
• In
the Good Old Days, the Enquirer would fill local pages with “evergreen”
stories written before holiday slow news days. If these timeless trivia
weren’t used, they could be spiked or recycled for future fallow news
days. Today, evergreens apparently have been tossed on the editorial
pyre while this metropolitan daily’s diminished staff is filling its
shrunken news hole with staff and reader pet photos.
• God
help the Enquirer photographer who brings in a horizontal (“landscape
format”) photo for page A1. It won’t fit. Formulaic layout has ads and
promos bannered across the top and bottom, a deep multi-column vertical
photo or graphic on the left and a little bit of news beside and beneath
that photo or illustration. It seems to be the same every day,
regardless of events. It hardly qualifies as design. Cover pages on the
Local section fare no better. My guess? The format saves thinking every
day about how best to present the news (“content” or “product”) for
remaining page editors at some central Midwest location.
• The
Nation offers evidence-based insights into school shootings from
Katherine S. Newman, coauthor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School
Shootings and dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins.
For
starters, teach kids it’s right, good and potentially life-saving to
tell adults when other children or teenagers talk about killing,
shooting, etc. Peers of potential killers are our best early warning
system.
Newman’s
research also rebuts NRA’s grandiose goal of an armed “guard” in every
school; most schools are unlikely to become killing grounds. She wrote:
“These
shootings tend to happen in small towns with no history of background
violence rather than in big cities which suffer almost every other kind
of brutal attack except this one. There has been only one example of a
rampage school shooting in an urban setting since 1970. All the others
have taken place in rural towns miles from places like New York or
Chicago, or in suburbs in the Western states.”
Paducah, Ky.,
was one of the towns that her team studied after Goth-wannabe Michael
Carneal shot five Heath High School classmates: three died, one is
paralyzed and another was badly wounded.
Newman’s
research reflects that of many others in describing Carneal as typical
of school shooters. He was a nerdy young white male who couldn’t make
lasting friendships and never fit in at school or in his
football-worshiping community. He was looking for acceptance and
“shooting people is drawn straight from the Hollywood playbook that
equates masculinity with violence.”
Carneal
talked a lot about shooting and killing but no one risked being called a
snitch by alerting his parents or adults at school.
• What
Were They Thinking? Gannett’s Journal News in suburban New York went
online with the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in two
counties in its circulation area. The paper says it will sue to force a
third county to provide that information. The paper claims the list and
accompanying interactive map showing permit holder’s locations are a
public service. Malarkey. Horse puckey. Madness. So what if the data
come from public records? So do names of men and women who claim to be
victims of sex crimes. We don’t publish that. So what is a reader
supposed to do with the handgun information? Cui bono?
Wingnuts
spin wild fantasies about burglaries to obtain handguns from permit
holders or burglars hitting homes where no one has a conceal/carry
permit. My problem is different:
it’s hard enough to wrest public documents from dim and self-serving
officials. Decisions by the Journal News can’t help but undermine
remaining public support for investigative/database reporting.
The
Enquirer, Louisville Courier Journal and Indianapolis Star also are
Gannett papers. I hope the Journal News' perversion of First Amendment
assertiveness doesn’t become a route to Gannett corporate rings for
editors and publishers. (My name will appear if the Enquirer identifies
permit holders in its circulation area. I took the class, passed the
exam and obtained my permit for a cover story a year after Ohio allowed
counties to issue conceal/carry permits.)
• Anger
over the Gannett paper’s online posting of names and addresses of
handgun permit holders (above) quickly morphed into online retaliation.
Some critics posted what they said was the home address and photo of
Gannett corporate CEO Garcia Martore. Other Gannett execs’ home
addresses have been posted and bloggers have listed home addresses and
contact information for staffers at the Journal News. The paper has
hired guards for its Westchester headquarters. If guards aren’t active
law enforcement officers, they must have handgun permits and could be
included in lists published by the paper.
• The
daily Brattleboro Reformer bannered this headline across page 1
recently: “Let is snow, let is snow, let is snow.” Executive editor Tom
D’Errico told romenesko.com
that it was a “terrible, terrible typo. The night crew was
short-staffed and we had an unusual last-minute early deadline with the
storm marching in.” Later, he wrote in his blog: “I kept running over
the reasons in my mind . . . of how or why a mistake like this can and
does happen. But everything just sounded like an excuse. And the truth
is: there is no excuse.”
• Ailing
former President George H.W. Bush had one of those “greatly
exaggerated” brushes with eternity recently. (That now-a-cliche
expression originated in Mark Twain’s response to a reporter who
confused him with ailing cousin James Ross Clemens. Snopes.com says Twain actually told the reporter, “The report of my death was an exaggeration” but added “greatly” in a manuscript.)
Back
to Bush the Elder. Houston’s WBAP-AM blasted an email saying, “The
Death of a President: George H. W. Bush.” Romenesko and Texas Observer
reported that news director Rick Hadley blamed the error on a common
practice among news media: “We get our obituaries ready to go for people
who aren’t doing well.” When Bush entered a local hospital’s ICU, WBAP
prepared an email blast for his death. Hadley said a problem with the
email system sent the death message to about a third of the station’s
subscribers. Thirty minutes later — after callers alerted the station to
its misstep — WBAP quickly sent out a corrected email. Hadley said the
bulletin was not read on the radio.
WBAP
was typical of smart news media: It updates obits of prominent men and
women to avoid being unprepared when the inevitable occurs. Unfailingly,
that’s on deadlines when staff is short and sources are unavailable
because of holidays or late/early hours. These advance obits have blanks
for timely details: age, cause of death, where the person died and a
credible confirmation of death. Then they are filed in ways meant to
prevent all-too-common premature release.
That caution didn’t prevent Germany's respected news weekly Der Spiegel from mistakenly publishing Bush’s obituary in late December. AP said, “The
unfinished obituary appeared on Der Spiegel's website for a few minutes
before it was spotted by Internet users and removed. In it, the
magazine's New York correspondent described Bush as ‘a colorless
politician’ whose image only improved when it was compared to the later
presidency of his son, George W. Bush.” A Der Spiegel Twitter feed
said, "All newsrooms prepare obituaries for selected figures. The fact
that the one for Bush senior went live was a technical mistake. Sorry!"
Years
ago at UPI, we put out HOLD FOR RELEASE obituaries of leading figures
worldwide. Some of our client media saved the incomplete obits to await
news of the death. Others removed mention of death and often published
them as space-filling weekend feature stories.
The
Associated Press doesn’t send out advance obits as a practice but Dan
Sewell, AP’s correspondent in Cincinnati, noted a different problem:
the subject outlives the byline reporter. Last year, New York Times
ombuds Margaret Sullivan wrote generally about obits after talking to
obit editor Bill McDonald and touched on that problem: “Occasionally,
the author of the obituary was already dead by the time the piece ran – Vincent Canby on Bob Hope and Mel Gussow on Elizabeth Taylor,
for example. Mr. McDonald said that in most cases when an obit subject
outlives the writer, The Times does a new piece. ‘But in select cases,’
he added, ‘we feel the obit is too fine to discard, particularly if it
is by a writer who brings a certain authority to it.’ The Times assigns a
live body to update the obit and, in the case of Mel Gussow, offered a
note to the reader acknowledging the status of the author.”
• We’ve
all won another battle to hold cops accountable. The American Civil
Liberties Union sued to preempt Chicago police who object to an ACLU
project on police accountability. ACLU wanted to make sure its employees
wouldn’t be busted for recording officers’ words. The federal appellate
court in Chicago said we all share a First Amendment right to record
what police say to us. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the
Chicago police appeal, affirming the lower court ruling. Earlier last
year, federal courts said we have a right to photograph police in
public. My guess is dimmer, bolder police everywhere will continue to
arrest reporters who record their words and others who photograph their
actions. That’s not futile. The possibility of an arrest record — even
knowing the charge will be tossed by a judge or prosecutor — can be
intimidating and leave cops free of scrutiny.
• Let
Congress obscure methods and goals in naming legislation but reporters
should challenge any legislator who talks about “preventing” gun
violence.
We can’t prevent it. With some nuts among
the 300-plus million living in this country and almost nonexistent mental
health programs, some killers will find and use firearms on other
people. We can’t prevent it. That we have hundreds of millions of
firearms makes massacres even likelier. Reporters should press
vote-seeking legislators on how their proposed restrictions will limit
casualties from inevitable firearm violence. That brings us back to the
1994 restriction on high-capacity magazines for semi-automatic weapons.
Hunting weapons and pistols for self-defense don’t need or use them.

SATURDAY NOV. 24: The best way to increase public safety is
to get things that imperil it off the street … and then auction them
off to the public so they’ll be back on the streets. That’s the
bulletproof rationale the Kentucky State Police are employing by selling
confiscated firearms to gun dealers.

Apologizes for posting mock election results early at Cincinnati.com

The Cincinnati Enquirer earlier today posted fake data on its website showing Mitt Romney with a 92,000-vote lead in a supposed early vote count in Ohio. Editors later posted an apology, explaining that the election-results chart was created as a template and was inadvertently posted early. The Enquirer explained the error: “A Cincinnati.com front-page link to a chart with dummy data, created as a
design template for election results, was inadvertently posted early
Tuesday morning. It purported to show early voting totals in
Ohio counties. However, no votes have been counted yet — by law counting
doesn't start until the polls close. Cincinnati.com regrets the error.” The correction came a bit
too late, however. Conservative-leaning Drudge Report had already
tweeted the false results before the apology was published, and journalism blogger Jim Romenesko called The Enquirer out on it. Providing voting results before polls close is typically frowned upon in media circles to avoid discouraging voters with potentially disappointing numbers.

If this presidential campaign hasn’t been sufficiently enervating, here’s more dispiriting news. Gallup reports that “Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high
this year, with 60 percent saying they have little or no trust in the
mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.”

Media musings on Cincinnati and beyond

• Look at the rare collection of Enquirer photos at the National Underground Freedom Center. They’ve been reprinted and for many, reprinted copies of original pages are nearby. The show is part of the much larger Fotofocus at many venues. Unfortunately, the Enquirer chose the Freedom Center which charges $12 admission; many Fotofocus displays are in admission-free venues such as the YWCA or UC’s Gallery on Sycamore. I think the oldest photo is from 1948, a one-legged veteran leading a parade to commemorate the end of WWI 30 years earlier. Many are by photographers with whom I worked and whose images I displayed large on local pages during weekends when I edited. Some are recent, by photographers I admire but know only from their images in the paper. To its credit, the Enquirer exhibit includes unpublished photos of which the photographers are justly proud. First among them is Gary Landers’ image of a homicide victim illuminated by an officer’s flashlight behind Landers’ home. Missing are two images that remind me of what photojournalism is about. One is Gerry Wolters’ stunning — and in its time, controversial Pulitzer contender — of a dead African-American lying in a pool of his blood on the Avondale street where he’d been shot by a bailbondsman. Standing over him is the dead man’s young son. Some readers said our photo would ruin the child’s life. No, I told callers, if anything would it was his father’s killing. The other missing photo was one that wasn’t published by the paper: Glenn Hartong’s firefighter carrying a toddler from a burning house. I’m told that editors flinched because they didn’t know if the child survived. So what? That faux humanity illustrates Enquirer execs’ fear of readers tossing their cookies into the Cheerios. Such touchy-feely screening sanitizes what can be a nasty, brutish and short life and lifestyle in our region. Life Magazine published Hartong’s photo across two pages and someone posted it in the Enquirer newsroom coffee alley. It doesn’t get better than that. In the Good Old Days, before self-inflicted sensitivity, the Enquirer had a unapologetic double standard for violent images. If the victim were local, the photo might be spiked to avoid upsetting readers. An example was the half-excavated body of a recognizable young construction worker suffocated in a trench cave-in. Distant victims — executions, genocide or bodies in floods/earthquakes — were likelier to be displayed. And even before the Good Old Days, Ed Reinke’s iconic photo of a line of shrouded bodies from the 1977 Beverly Hills supper club fire gave a sense of magnitude to the disaster that our best reporting couldn’t. It’s the first photo in the exhibit, preceded by a warning that some images could be troubling. They should be. I don’t know if Reinke’s photo would be used today. • Ohio’s Sherrod Brown is among the Democratic senators targeted by out-of-state billionaire GOP donors. He’s an unapologetic liberal and the Progressive monthly made Brown’s re-election battle its latest cover story. A point I’d missed elsewhere is the unusual state FOP endorsement for a Democrat but Brown stood with officers against Republican legislation stripping them of most of their bargaining rights. The Progressive story includes a Mason-area jeweler whose health insurer refused to pay for an advanced cancer treatment. Husband and wife say Reps. Jean Schmidt and John Boehner brushed off their pleas to intervene with the insurer. A Brown staffer — who said she didn’t care what party the Republican couple belongs to — spent the weekend successfully persuading the insurer to cover the potentially life-saving $100,000 procedure. More recently, reporters on Diane Rehm’s public radio show estimated SuperPACs are spending $20 million to defeat Brown and suggested it might not suffice. As a DailyBeast.com columnist notes, polls show Republican Josh Mandel probably won’t even carry his home Jewish community in Cleveland.• That same Progressive names 26 billionaires and their known donations to Republican and other rightwing causes in this election year. No Cincinnati-area men or women made the list but it’s reasonable to infer that some of the men listed donated secretly to Super PACs opposing Ohio’s Sherrod Brown’s re-election (see above). • As one of that dying breed — an Enquirer subscriber who prefers print — my morning paper is missing a lot. Customer service provided a free online copy and promised to deliver the missing paper paper the next day. Next day? Another customer service rep said only replacement Sunday Enquirers are delivered the same day. Message? Don’t stiff advertisers. • The ad on the top half of the back page of the Oct. 11 Enquirer Local section invited everyone to a Romney-Ryan “victory event” on Oct. 13 at Lebanon’s Golden Lamb. The bold, black ad headline on the bottom half of the page was “The #1 dishwasher is also a best value.” • Want to know more about Sarah Jones, the former Ben-Gal and school teacher who admitted to sex with a 17-year-old student? Among others, London’s Daily Mail has enough to satisfy anyone who doesn’t need to see a sex tape. • Don’t piss off Turks. That’s a lesson lots of people have learned to their pain over the generations. No one will be surprised if Turkish forces invade Syria to end Syrian shelling of Turkish civilians. Turkish troops have gone into Iraq to deal with threatening rebellious Turkish Kurds seeking sanctuary there. Turkey is a NATO member and NATO says it will defend Turkey if required. A couple English-language websites can complement the snippets about this aspect of Syria’s civil war: aljazeera.com from the Gulf and hurriyetdailynews.com from Turkey. • The New York Times stepped back from the slippery slope of allowing subjects of news stories to say what news is fit to print. It allowed some sources to review and possibly change their quotes before reporters used them. In July, Times reporter Jeremy Peters blew the whistle on the Times and other major news media. The alternative to quote approval often was the threat of no interview. Initially, the Times defended the practice. No longer. Jimromenesko.com reported the change. Times executive editor Jill Abramson told Romenesko that quote approval “puts so much control over the content of journalism in the wrong place . . . We need a tighter policy.”Romenesko quoted a recent Times memorandum that said “demands for after-the-fact quote approval by sources and their press aides have gone too far . . . The practice risks giving readers a mistaken impression that we are ceding too much control over a story to our sources. In its most extreme form, it invites meddling by press aides and others that goes far beyond the traditional negotiations between reporter and source over the terms of an interview . . . So starting now, we want to draw a clear line on this. Citing Times policy, reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit.”Good. Here’s my question: What happens when a beat reporter can’t get an important interview after citing Times policy? Access is everything. Few people who want media attention will turn away the Times, but editors can get weird when reporters can’t get a desired interview. • Daily papers own and are members of the Associated Press. In their rush to be first, AP reporters used social media to get out the news and scooped member papers whose editors hadn’t seen the stories yet. That went over badly in today’s breathlessly competitive world. AP promises it won’t use social media until after breaking news is sent to members and non-member subscribers. • It’s time for the news media to abandon “reverse discrimination” when the purported victim is white and English-speaking. It’s an issue again because the U.S. Supreme Court is reconsidering university racial admission criteria. A young woman claims the University of Texas rejected her because she is white. Discrimination is discrimination; someone is favored and someone is rejected. I won’t anticipate the court’s decision but the ethical issue is whether the community’s or the individual’s compelling interests are paramount when discrimination becomes policy and practice. Moreover, demographic trends could make “reverse discrimination” obvious nonsense if Anglos become a minority among newly-hyphenated and darker-skinned Americans and immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia. • We’ve seen three debates, two presidential, one veepish. The third was Tuesday or last night if you’re reading this on Wednesday. I missed it; I was fishing in Canada. Other journalists will tell you what you heard really means. I’ll catch up when I get home. At least the Biden-Ryan contest was lively and the moderator asked smart, sharp questions and kept the politicians under control. • The vice president and challenger had disturbingly weird expressions when they listened. Biden’s smile recalled a colleague’s remark after waterskiing with me: “I saw Ben smile and he wasn’t baring his teeth.” Worse, Biden’s expression could appear to be a smirk. Ryan’s intensity reminded me of a predator wondering about its next meal. Neither appearance had anything to do with the substance of the debate but it’s how we tend to judge people we don’t know. My question: Is this really how we choose the man one heartbeat away from leadership of The Free World (whatever the hell that means)?• Viewers — and these performances are TV events — worry me. Too many tell reporters and pollsters that their votes can be influenced by how the candidates came across in the debates. The president and vice president do not belong to debating societies. This isn’t Britain’s House of Commons. The ability to “win” a televised encounter has little or nothing to do with the job for which the men are contesting. Winners won’t debate until and unless they seek office again. • News media would be in doldrums if there weren’t stories to write before and after each debate. They burn space and time when little else is happening - if you discount the economy, pestilence, war, famine, etc. • Stories I didn’t read beyond the headlines. One’s from HuffingtonPost.com: "Lindsay Lohan Reveals Her Pick For President"The other is from the Thedailybeast.com:"LINDSAY LOHAN PICKS MITT! & OTHER TOXIC ENDORSEMENTS"

THURSDAY OCT. 11: The Reds today became the first team in National League history to blow a
2-0 lead in a five-game Division Series. This latest painful postseason
exit for a Cincinnati sports team caused more chafing than others
because of how well the Reds played during the regular season, and for
the first time in like 20 years local sports fans thought their team had
a legitimate shot at winning a title.

Media musings on Cincinnati and beyond

Enquirer editor Carolyn Washburn’s recent note to
readers assures us that the continually shrinking page will elicit
readers’ joyous cries of “new and improved!”
Don’t hold your breath.
The 10-1/2 x 14-2/3 page — about the size of the Business
Courier — will be printed in Columbus on the Dispatch’s new press. The
tabloid should given designers greater freedom to fill the news hole
with large photos, graphics and headlines. The local section is so small
now that I’m almost inured to diminishing returns on my rising
subscription rates.
Page size isn’t the issue; what’s on them is what matters.
I’ve worked on tabloid-format dailies in three countries. Today, few
papers are sold on the street and huge headlines to grab passersby are
wasted space. “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and “Ford to City: Drop
Dead” were perfect in New York but not here. We need smart, patient
reporting. That requires space in the paper. Whether we get it has
nothing to do with page size.
• Publisher Margaret Buchanan’s
subsequent page 1 note to readers last Sunday was hardly reassuring. It
repeats much of editor Carolyn Washburn’s memo (above) and reinforces my
fears: “The pages will be organized with fewer jumps so you
don’t have to turn pages to continue reading the same story. Headlines
will be bolder. The print edition will be more colorful with larger
photos and graphics to help tell the stories. Most importantly, we’ll
continue to provide unique in-depth news stories ..."
Buchanan comes from the advertising/business side of
Gannett journalism, so maybe she isn’t troubled by the contradiction in
her assurances: short stories burdened by big headlines, photos and
graphics on tabloid pages can’t be “in-depth” unless they jump from page
to page. And she’s promising “fewer jumps.” Is the next innovation with
purpose a shift from “readers” to “viewers”?
• Does the Enquirer have a policy about naming juveniles
accused of crimes or is it an adhocracy among editors? When Avondale
kids wanted for shoplifting fled in a car, they were named in the first
story. When a suburban high school student was accused of a central role
in a major drug ring, the first story didn’t name him and said that
discretion was Enquirer policy. “Avondale” long has been code for black
at the paper. “Suburban” or identifying with a suburban high school
means white even if that is no longer a reasonable assumption in many
cases.
• Last Sunday, WVXU carried a fine conversation between
Enquirer sports reporter and author John Erardi and WVXU politics
reporter (and lifelong Reds fan) Howard Wilkinson. They talked about
Barry Larkin and why he was being inducted into the Baseball Hall of
Fame. They know their stuff, they obviously enjoy each other’s company,
not least because Wilkinson also spent decades at the Enquirer writing
about politics and on rare occasion, Reds baseball.
I enjoyed their insights and storytelling even though I’m
not a baseball fan. I think I’ve been to three, maybe four Reds games
in as many decades. Blame my parents. The Twins didn’t exist when I was a
kid; it was Minneapolis Millers v. St. Paul Saints at Nicollet Park in
Minneapolis and I don’t remember seeing them. We didn’t have modern
Vikings either and the Lakers left town. No way to nurture a fan.
• I wish I wasn’t eating when I read Dan Horn’s recent
encyclopedia update on water quality in the Ohio River. His Enquirer
report was well done. The photos were marvelous. My upset was personal:
memories.
When we moved to Cincinnati in 1967, we moored our boat at
Elmer & Jenny’s Yacht Club downriver in Bromley, Ky. Wonderful
people, but “yacht club”? I don’t think so.
I water-skied
in the river, aware of its water quality but
in denial; it’s hard to give up the one sport I enjoyed from childhood
... in Minnesota. I only swam in the Ohio to put on or retrieve skies
or to drop the rope and wait for my wife to pick me up. I didn’t
swallow.
I don’t remember infections or gastro-intestinal problems
from Ohio River water. After all, I had skied for years in the St.
Croix between Minnesota and Wisconsin, in the industrial Upper
Mississippi at the Twin Cities and downriver to the the two rivers
merged. God knows what was in those pre-EPA waters then but maybe I
brought immunities to the Ohio.
After three years, we left Elmer & Jenny’s Yacht Club
for Rocky Fork Lake near Hillsboro in Highland County. We sought fresher
breezes and a ski zone free of barge tows and increasingly wild,
mindless boaters in the Ohio’s Cincinnati basin. Cleaner water was a
bonus. I still didn’t swallow.
Recalling the Ohio River in the 1960s — aided by Horn’s
detailed story — was the best appetite suppressant I’ve experienced in
years.
• If you’re going to do gotcha journalism, do your
homework. A conservative blogger challenged Cleveland columnist Connie
Schultz, sure she was a liberal who gets too close to leftwing
politicians she covers. “We have found numerous photos of you with Sen.
Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him. Care to
comment?”
Here’s part of Shultz’s response, courtesy of jimromenesko.com:
“He’s really cute. He’s also my husband. You know that, right?” Shultz
told her former employer, the Plain Dealer where she won a Pulitzer
Prize, that she hadn’t named the blogger because she wants him to “pick
better company and do better journalism.”
Romensko said Schultz told him in a telephone interview, “I don’t want to be a bully. I can say he was working for one of the
larger conservative blogs, but that his name is not in the staff
directory. Maybe he’s an intern, maybe an editor was playing a joke on
him or maybe he was trying to get a reaction out of me. But I just want
him to stop hanging around with those people and learn something out of
this.”
• Jimromenesko.com
(see above) also reports that elsewhere in northern Ohio, the Sandusky
Register posted a voice mail message left by Erie County Tom Paul for
reporter Andy Ouriel. Paul said there was a mistake in the previous
day’s edition. Here is part of the relentlessly F-bombing message: “You
don’t know your ass from a fucking hole in the ground. And you know
what? — sorry about that but you make me mad. Give me a call back, 419-357-2985, ya shithead.”
• Louisville’s Courier-Journal chose discretion over valor
by not naming two juveniles convicted of sexually assaulting
17-year-old Kentuckian Savannah Dietrich. Lots of people, however,
already knew despite the judge’s gag order. She tweeted their names to
protest over what she fears will be judicial slaps on their wrists.
Dietrich told the Courier-Journal they assaulted her when she passed out
after drinking at a party. The youths also shared digital images of the
assault with others. After negotiations with prosecutors, the pair pled
guilty to first-degree sexual abuse and misdemeanor voyeurism.
Dietrich faces up to180 days in jail and a $500 fine if the judge
convicts her of contempt.
• If you’ve followed news stories about the run-up to the
London summer Olympics, you must know that security for the events and
sites is a shambles, even by British standards of bumbling through. The
firm that was paid to provide security failed in every way. The
government minister responsible for domestic security failed to respond
promptly or adequately. The badly stretched Army — already being
dramatically reduced in strength and losing historic regiments — is
filling roles designed for civilian rent-a-cops and ushers. One cartoon
expressed its contempt for the organizers with soldiers being told
they’ll be able to return to Afghanistan after the Olympics. Be grateful
that Cincinnati’s bid for this colossal money pit was rejected.
• Here’s a question I haven’t seen asked by the national
press: Do we want a president as detached as Romney says he was from his
responsibilities as owner and CEO of Bain? He says he didn’t know if
his subordinates were shipping jobs overseas. The screwed up Salt Lake
City Olympics — which he did help save — were more important. I believe
him. But how does that salvage his claim to being a keen businessman
who can sort out our country’s economy?
• Get over it. With more than 300 million citizens and
immigrants and almost as many firearms, Americans have nut jobs and a
few will be violent. So I wouldn’t be unhappy if our mainstream news
media suffered massacre fatigue. Maybe the latest Colorado shootings
will speed that process. Similar fatigue already is evident in
diminished foreign/war news.
It isn’t a question of whether to focus on the victims or
the shooter or a search for “reasons.” You don’t ask mass killers for
reasons. Given the utter inadequacy of mental health services and our
easy access to firearms, our rational response is to accept the risk
that someone else will die in irrational mass shootings. That’s a price
the NRA and its pusillanimous legislative allies find acceptable if the
alternative is more effective firearm regulation.
A different rational response might be a news media
campaign for a costly, annual federal tax stamp for every high-capacity
magazine for every firearm to which they can be fitted. This wouldn’t
disarm hunters in any way. Semi-automatic hunting rifles and shotguns
don’t have or require 20 or 30 cartridges to put venison or duck on the
table.
The tax would include the stick-like magazines for
semi-automatic pistols and submachineguns and the familiar curved
magazines for civilian versions of the AK47 and its kin. Drum magazines -
like that found at the Aurora theater - can hold scores of rounds and
be fitted to some military and military-style weapons as well as the
Thompson submachinegun and its descendants. Drums would be covered,
too.
This tax wouldn’t take away anyone’s firearm or
testosterone-enhancing firepower. It doesn’t limit the number of rounds
shooters can load into their weapons the way the extinct Clinton-era
10-shot limit did. The sole function of high-capacity magazines is to
make it easier to kill lots of people. That’s why real military weapons
like the AK47, the M16 or even the World War II Browning Automatic Rifle — the famous BAR — had high-capacity clips.
The tax would not be a Second Amendment issue ... or
shouldn’t be. It copies the longstanding $200 federal tax required for
fully automatic weapons owned by civilians. Americans buy those firearms
and pay the tax.
• Americans own more handguns, shotguns and rifles every
year and reported violent crime has sharply declined. Coincidence?
Absolutely. Second Amendment? When’s the last time you heard about
someone with a licensed concealed firearm and an extra-high-capacity
magazine stopping a crazed gunman? Believe me, the news media would be
full of such a story or NRA complaints about liberal suppression of a
patriotic tale.
I’m talking about a news media campaign to make it harder
to kill lots of people in a few seconds or minutes. However, that
throws us into the confused world of acceptable risks. There isn’t a
chance in Columbine of doing more than taxing high-capacity magazines
when Americans also accept as normal the thousands of daily deaths from
drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, obesity, medical errors, etc.
• There’s still another related, rational response for the
news media to the Batman killings: Give less prominence to nut cases
worrying whether the Muslim Brotherhood has a sleeper agent at
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right elbow, or that less than a
20- or 30-round magazine will allow Mongolian mercenaries in UN blue
helmets and black helicopters to enslave us to a world government. On
the other hand, while the GOP and its crazier allies promote distrust,
fear and hatred of government, don’t expect such courage from the news
media. That could risk being seen as partisan.
CONTACT BEN KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com